what the hell happened to GW fellas....
what the hell happened!!!


also why are all pictures broken
this is terrible


love u

Hey I am looking for my old game Sluggy's adventure! The first one I made, in 2004. I can't find it anywhere! All I find is either the early demo with half the levels, broken downloads or links to broken downloads, or links to the now non-existing gamingw.net download page. If anyone has the game it would be really rad! Thanks!
(the link at this topic doesn't work either, the page it leads to doesn't have the download)

I hope foget will remain the unofficial mascot cuz those smileys sure took a while to draw....

My favorite webcomic is Buttersafe

http://www.buttersafe.com/

Its pretty neat, its got two artists who make different styled single paged gags. Its similar to like XKCD in the tone of the humor except its not nerdy jokes and its funny (heh get it I just said xkcd isn't funny (just kidding xkcd can be funny sometimes but its mostly hit and miss))

I also read

Abominable Charles Christopher http://horhaus.com/abominable/
Cool story-based comic with a realistic art style about a yeti-like monster in a world with talking animals.
Gunnerkrigg Court http://www.gunnerkrigg.com/index2.php
Cool story-based comic with a fairy tale-like art style about a girl in a harry potter like school except its cool
Horribleville http://horribleville.com/
Autobiographical-ish short stories comic by KC Green, his art is cool and hes funny.
Girly http://girlyyy.com/
Story-based comic with a cool, expressive cartoon style, with lesbians and cats and whatever.
Sam and Fuzzy http://www.samandfuzzy.com/
Black and white story-based cartoony comic about a guy and a talking bear, can be pretty funny, and the art improved a lot as time went on.
DrMcNinja http://www.drmcninja.com/
Adventures of a ninja, story-based, its cool and funny and not as dumb as it might sound though its still a bit dumb.
Kinokofry http://kinokofry.com/
Cartoony and cute single page gag comic with mushroom people and cool watercolor art sometimes.

I could try to shoo him off I guess, but I don't think what the guy does would be wrong, no.

As I said, its too bad for digital artists because anything we do is very hard to sell: If something can be easily reproduced and keep its entire original value it is inherently worthless as something to sell, not accounting the materials, time and skill needed for the reproduction itself (in the case of a any digital file, its free, instantaneous and easy, whoops). Its unfair, it really is, but its the sad truth. All I would be doing by selling the prints to begin with, is sell the service and materials for printing out the image I made, unless I found a way to somehow keep monopoly over the image (for instance if the image was hand painted like I said before, copies of it would always have a lesser value)

it doesn't apply because it's not about intellectual property. you can clone a house design all you like, because your basic suburban house design isn't copyrightable, you're the one putting up the funds for building materials. this is in stark contrast to waiting for someone to finish something and then just distributing what they made.

You are obtusely going too far into comparing houses and music. Any analogy breaks down if you over analyze them while missing its point on purpose. The point was comparing the work of going through building a house to the work of commercializing a song, with their respective costs and expected revenues, and then what happens when you take out the product's marketability by having new technology that takes out the worth of single units of the product (a single house vs. a single CD)by making them easy to reproduce. Whether houses are copyrightable or not is meaningless here. Analogies man.

unrealistic is not the same as right. the current music model is flawed and definitely not sustainable, but that doesn't mean you have a right to put up a torrent of britneys latest album. and the industry IS moving forward, albeit slowly - i can listen to fully licensed music free on spotify right now.
the analogies that the music industry use to combat piracy, however incorrect, do not make the act of copyright infringement acceptable. (im fully aware that actually downloading copyrighted media isn't illegal in itself - it's sharing that is illegal. although in the age of torrents the two are blurred. and BTW: ive never argued against actually downloading for this reason. my argument is purely against copyright infringement - illegal distribution. which is what the pirate bay do.)

I believe its entirely right to put up a torrent of Britney's latest album. Its Britney's right to try and stop people from sharing her songs in whatever way she wants, but If I have a music file on my hard drive, I can share it to whoever I want. Too bad for Britney. If they don't want me to be able to share it, make it impossible for me to record, because otherwise its up for grabs. It really is a big shame to artists who work strictly digitally, it makes whatever they make pretty much unsellable as units since no "real", physical version of the work can be sold, while a painter can sell a painting, which will always have a higher worth than say a digital photo of it (unless the digital artist keeps a high resolution version of his work and only prints out limited resolution versions, in which case he can try to sell a full-resolution print or something, but whoever buys it could then scan and distribute the fuck out of it... too bad...)
I don't believe sharing music is violating anyone's intellectual property. Its too bad for artists, hell its too bad for me, but its not wrong, and I wont let personal bias from my own interests interfere with my honest opinions.
I don't believe I have the right to claim I composed someone's songs however, or use their art as part of my own or in some commercial work or as some way of representing myself without their consent. I am pretty sure it is what Jamicus really meant when saying he doesn't believe in intellectual property, and what he really meant is that he doesn't believe in the current definition of copyrights. IP and copyrights as terms are often swapped by mistake. (Correct me if I'm wrong there Jamie)

well im sure glad you can just sit back and accept piracy as something that is fine and dandy like that. i feel that most people would have a bit more backbone in this matter, especially if it was their means of living.

Right, I hold these views because I'm weak and cant stand up for myself and my intellectual property, not because I thought about it or anything. You are pretty condescending.

this is one of the dumber arguments against copyright I've ever heard. The house analogy doesn't even apply.

Say you put your thousands of dollars producing an album intending to sell it for a small amount to recoup your expenses. Then someone comes along and gives YOUR work away for free. YOUR work that you put your time effort and money into. You think that is RIGHT?

I don't see how the house analogy doesn't apply, even your own argument works with it. The only bias the analogy has works in your favor: individual houses have to be built while one music track can be sold over and over again, so it would be a bigger loss to the house builders than to people in the music industry.

Your reply to my argument is pretty much "But its unfair, people work on shit and spend time and ressources and they need compensation". I agree! I said that the situation is unfair to artists, but I don't think its wrong for the potential consumer to get the free version if its easy to obtain. Its unrealistic to expect people to choose to buy music en masse if the free version is just as easy to get if not easier, its like expecting people to send money to charities: it can happen but you sure as hell cant count on that. The music and movie industries have to change their approach entirely or are condemned to wither and die as torrents and shit become even more mainstream and easy.

The fact copying music is easy and accessible has made music as files essentially "worthless". Just like any image you find on the internet and can just save on your hard drive is "worthless". What still has a worth however is the intellectual property itself: while the music file is worthless by itself, the rights to use it in a movie or in some other commercial manner still has a high value.
Same goes for any image file you find on the web: You would probably pay the image's author if you were to use the file in a commercial job like a website layout, but you would never pay him to just stick it on your hard drive to look at it or as a desktop background, right? That analogy works pretty well because it establishes the difference between copying an image file on your computer, and the theft of the author's intellectual property. The music industry is trying to convince you that copying a file is stealing IP, and its not. Claiming you made it, selling it or using that song in your own movie is. They put a price tag on something that current technology has made "worthless", they cant blame you for not paying it. Its too bad that its become worthless, but its irreversible and they have to deal with the new situation. Trying to make laws for it is their current way of dealing with it and it probably won't work.

I think that stopping people from sharing music is like forcing people to burn their newspapers after reading them to make sure everyone pays for reading it: again, its unfair to newspapers if you can read all of what they write without ever paying for your copy because someone handed you theirs, but they cant expect you to pay for a new copy if you can get one for free. Its unfair to them, but that's their problem, not yours. Trying to make laws to force you to burn your papers or throw them away or make them otherwise inaccessible to whoever hasn't paid for it would be a normal reaction on their part if they thought they were losing a lot of money over paper sharing, but it would never work. Again, that analogy has a slight bias for your view since individual newspaper copies have to be printed.

Music is no longer defined by the CD its on that you have to buy, music is now an easy to reproduce data file. The entertainment industries rely on the first definition of music and movies to work, and that is their downfall. Web-based services like Itunes are probably the future of entertainment, since what they essentially do is provide a more fair, and better service (larger selection all under the same service, always available regardless of whether or not someone out there is seeding it) than pirates do , but make you pay for it. They essentially joined the pirates by competing with them, and that's probably what the industry as a whole should head for.

Maybe if you had the ability to produce anything of value you'd think differently.  

har youre such a nice guy dom also selling art is my current source of income whoops

I don't think that whether pirating things SHOULD be legal or not is that clear. I actually think it should be legal. I dont know, I think its pretty obvious a lot of people share that opinion but lots of people try to cultivate some sort of piracy guilt, like that its OBVIOUSLY WRONG. I think its unfair to artists that piracy is that easy, but I dont think that makes it wrong.

The way I see it is, the internet is slowly going to make the entertainment industry as it exists today obsolete. The 21rst century's technological situation has reduced the worth of popular media to almost nothing because of file sharing. Its terrible, its unfair to people who make a living out of it, but there's nothing they can do about it. You cant just undo technology. Their attempts at making people feel bad by calling file sharing theft are pathetic. Copy isn't theft. If you had a machine that could duplicate houses, using it would be unfair to house builders, but it wouldn't be theft. Fuck house builders, gimme my free house, and go build trains instead, or become a house duplicator machine repairman.

(also wow I just posted on GW for the first time in months)

Honestly I don't remember any dead moment in Harvey Birdman, I remember loving the show exactly because of that, it was really consistently funny, not a dead moment.
I don't remember any particularly weak moment in Venture Bros either, though not always funny, its never boring like say ATHF can be(and usually is).

I remember liking the few Frisky Dingo episodes I watched, but not enough to make me want to watch the rest though.

Venture bros and Harvey Birdman are some of my favorite animated shows. Harvey birdman was just silly characters and absurd humor but had such great timing with it, I remember gasping for air in a few episodes. It had some pretty decent voice acting too.
I also like Metalocalypse, Tim & Eric and Robot chicken, but Aqua teen hunger force just has very sparse funny bits in an otherwise pretty boring show. I just remember a few episodes that were consistantly funny.

I don't believe in feeling gratitude towards "nature". Animals aren't as far as we know some group of beings that collectively agreed to help us humans grow as a species. Dogs didn't all meet one day and decide HEY LETS HELP BLIND PEOPLE. Animals feed us and work for us because we make them do it. We use animals the same way we use wind and fire. I understand we should be glad animals are there, but they do not form some sort of collective we should feel gratitude to.

For the feelings part, yeah of course animals have "feelings". A dog that is left alone will start crying, and be visibly glad when their masters come back. Fishes that are well fed and have a clean place to live will swim around quick, and hungry fish in murky water will be almost motionless and look almost depressed. Animals very sensitive, and express their states of mind in their own way. People who claim otherwise are usually just trying to provide a convenient answer to the nagging question of "why is it okay to slaughter cattle by millions", and are ashamed to rely on meaningless cop-out answers like "WE HAVE SOULS AND THEY DON'T".

However, I don't think attributing animals "feelings" and using that as a reason to treat them equally(or whatever) makes any more sense: feelings in their POETIC sense are pretty much a human-created concept, and we project these concepts on animals when trying to understand how they feel.
For instance,  looking in a dog's eyes: As you stare at the dog, you try to imagine that it is also staring back at you, and try to imagine what he is thinking, doing that from your own understanding of life and through this falsely attributing the dog human traits. Its empathy, its how we deal with other humans, its what gives you a natural inhibition from hurting another human being. Looking at them and understanding they are staring right back at you, like a mutual understanding of each others' sentience. For animals, the effect of empathy still remains, but the more different the animal is to you the weaker is its effect: you have a harder time making that connection.

Attributing them romantic and vague concepts of feelings we humans made up makes no sense however. Animals are sad, or happy, or angry. They are territorial, protective. They are hungry, thirsty, they are in heat, they are passive, they are active, they are agressive, they feel safe or threatened. It is the same for us, except that because of our intelligence and natural need of beautifying things and classifying things and placing greater meaning in things that are mostly meaningless in our search for existential answers and shit, we made up a whole panoply of different tones and contexts and combination's and half-tones and tangents to these basic emotions and then attribute them to everything around us. Dolphins laugh, birds are happy, bears are grumpy, dogs are faithful, mice are curious, hyenas are cruel, lions are proud. Ants weren't so lucky though, they're just "hard workers". Heh, suckers, must be because of the wiggly legs and beady eyes and antennas.

So basically, yeah, animals do feel things like we do, but its not all that special and is sort of an arbitrary reason to use in deciding what we should consider to have rights to be "ethically treated". As I said before, I do think torturing animals and killing or raping them is never a good thing, but it is not the animal victims I worry about, but rather the damage that such behavior could represent on mankind. As for the question of, what SHOULD we use to decide what deserves rights for ethical treatment and where to draw the line however, I have no idea. My first guess would be intelligence, creativity or capacity to communicate, but we barely know how these things even work.

I'm saying they should, its a human thing, but they also shouldn't because it doesn't make sense to have empathy for something you are eating with a side of gravy. Its a sort of ambiguous relation that probably/maybe only humans have towards their food, and it is maybe the presence of something like this that makes the difference between a potential psycho killer and a normal everyday guy. In other words its not a feeling that really makes sense, but taking it away is probably unhealthy.

I don't really have much empathy for animals and don't personally really, really care if the chicken I'm eating was raped and tortured and had his hen and chicks shot down before him and lost his home and valuables, and then the butcher burns his eye out with a cigarette and says "say uncle.... say uncle" the chicken tries but he can only say "cluck" and the butcher knows this, its part of the torture you see so he chops one wing off and says SAY UNCLE DAMMIT NOT CLUCK and the chicken just cries and then the butcher chops its head off and then wraps it up and sends it on my table.
Its just a gaddam chicken. *crunch crunch mmh cruelty it tastes so good it makes the meat taste better I can actually taste cruelty its a little lemony*

But I do think that maybe groups like PETA (or at least groups that fill in the role PETA claims to fill, which is arguable PETA does not, or does very badly) are necessary to keep the food industry in check. It is simply not very good for people in general to be desensitized to violence at such a degree theyd' zap pigs for fun to hear them squeal like the pigs they are. OF course most places arnt like this, but these things do happen, and not only within the food industry, lots of people torture little animals for fun, its even a stereotypical CRAZY GUY UPBRINGING like every other psychopath has a "he tortured little animals as a kid" part in his biography.
Its a very human thing to have empathy for things you should not have empathy for (namely your food). I think its healthy for people to be horrified at the thought that what they're chewing on was once alive and made friendly little clicky noises,  I think that makes people think and making people think is always a good thing.

That's right I think animal rights movements are good for humans! I don't give a feck about animals! KILL ALL ANIMEL

With big game developers like EA or whatever, of course game design jobs are rare, most employees there just work on a product without ever being really part of its concept. Actually, even the top designers in companies have very little creative freedom and must usually work in the confines of the intellectual property the game is based on, etc.

But the big companies arn't the only ones out there, there are thousands of smaller companies that make games for mobile phones, handheld consoles, board games, casual games. These companies are often very small teams of people who work closely together, and often they have way more creative freedom in what they do. Of course, these companies don't offer the same kind of job safety a big company does, and you are very unlikely to ever work on a AAA game there.

Also, I am pretty sure that this game design degree isn't really about game design, but really about getting a job in the gaming industry in general. I am pretty sure the basic idea is to train people all around and get them specific jobs that might or might not eventually lead to a more creative one, especially 3d modelers, which game companies need a lot of.

The idea of getting anyone hired as a game designer right off the bat is ridiculous: you CAN'T be hired as a designer if you just have a degree. You need experience, it doesn't matter what school you are from. No company will just pick you up and give you the creative lead of a project they put money into, unless you have a lot of creative background and experience. That doesn't just apply for the games industry, its for any kind of design-related job. The teachers cannot possibly be telling their students that a game design job will be open to them when they have a degree, the only way for that to happen is if they go on their own.

Heh thats a silly ad.
Its sort of odd though, I mean its a superbowl ad, which they spent a lot of money on obviously, and it has very memorable imagery, but the message at the end makes the whole thing just silly and forgettable. How much does it cost to show an ad at the superbowl, its like millions right?

I'm in a degree right now that sort of looks like what you described your game design degree was, except its oriented towards art and general design rather than game design. Most of our courses are about 2d and 3d animation, sound edition, video edition, flash and web design.

From what my teachers and the industry people they brought in to talk to us say:
The one most important thing you have to handle right if you want any job as a designer, no matter what type of design it is, is to follow trends and technology, and be up to date with it all. Things happen so fast. For instance, around 2007 and 2008 there was a significant new element in the world of web design: fast, reliable real time 3d to be used in flash.  http://www.papervision3d.org/  Before that, people who wanted to include 3d animations or effects in web pages had to either pre-render movies or do some fake 3d-ish effects. With that arrival, web design changed considerably, and for a while design companies and advertising firms would only hire people who could use that and could innovate based on that new hot tool. The craze died down soon enough, and then other trends popped up. Advertisement sites for movies and the like all milked that new thing dry. Its still being used a lot naturally but its lots its original shine and is sort of just another useful thing out there now.
Creative, technology-based jobs are like a crazy arms race, where a new bigger badder nuke appears on the market every now and then. And if you cant get that nuke while its hot, you're out of a job. Design is dirty and evil and ruthless. Professionally at least. As a hobby its just fun and games, its two completely different worlds.

About the game design course, I don't think it could really be useless. Colleges usually work very closely with the source of the jobs' demands, if they didn't know what the industry needs they would be out of a business. Usually teachers there come from the industry and know about how fast its world moves. Well it is the feeling I got from my own teachers at least, who keep bringing in big designer peoples from the advertisement, game design, animation, movie making and web design industries. They talk about their experiences, how the creative process goes, the kind of problems they encounter, the overall atmosphere and competition, the new trends.

The design world is pretty much Galactus and you are some dude somewhere and Galactus doesn't even care you exist and just eats you up and you die unless you're SUPERMAN because then Galactus sort of acknowledges you're there before eating you up.

It is pretty messed up to poison baby's milk to make money, but no crime is vile enough to warrant giving any government the right to murder its own citizens (or anyone actually). Sentencing people to death is an inherently barbaric idea, one humanity should grow out of.
Don't misunderstand me, if someone killed my child to make a buck I would probably want to kill them MYSELF. It wouldn't give me the right to, however: there is no justification for murder, absolutely none. Reporters would ask me, do you think the criminals' sentence was high enough? I'd answer NO! I want their  B L O O D  on my hands! No sentence would quench my thirst of vengeance and justice, I would want them to burn in hell forever, but thats why I wouldn't be the one to pick a sentence to begin with, that's why a civilized government would pick a cool-headed judge to put the criminal behind bars and leave it at that.

I thought this was about Patrick Roark from the sin city comics heh


I dont know that guy at all.... I never really watched star trek (or spy kids heh)

Well yeah many people and companies develop flying vehicles, and lots of them have a similar shape. Heres the image of one: http://www.autounleashed.com/images/moller_m200g_flying_car.jpg
That model of "flying car" is only sold in auctions right now apparently but yeah, it shows that it could be something similar. Notice how the propellers are not jutting out from the surface, and are probably invisible. It could have been something similar to this. Those move around very slowly, but this could have been some sort of military model of it that moves faster and flies higher. Could you assess its size at all? Also are you sure that it really ever broke the sound barrier or moved that fast? These machines can probably make an infernal sound when they start up, and the models youve seen might just make a sound thats so loud it sounds like a sound barrier break at startup. And maybe that what you thought was a super fast movement was really two of these vehicles blinking their lights and alternating, giving you the impression it was one vehicle being at one place and then the other.

Also, fishy thing though, if they was over you all the time and came only close enough that they were the size of a lemon in the sky, it means it never really went at your eye level or even close, so how could you see them from the side so you could draw that little pic with the glass window? This is making me think youre bullshittin' us....

I don't think that the military or private companies having and testing secret hi-tech vehicles or spacecraft is such an outlandish crazy idea in itself, I mean if a company indeed was working on technology that is so advanced it looks like its from outer space, they would probably want to keep it secret until they can find a way to market or otherwise use it, they don't want a competitor to just snag the idea or technology from them.
The only part that seems out of place or strange in this, is the fact you saw it. Why would they risk putting their big project out to be seen by people? Especially in this day and age when every other guy has a camera integrated to their cellphones. This didn't apply as much at all four years ago, but even back then it would have been a pretty risky thing to do. They would instead test things like that at large over the ocean or something.

Another possibility is that it really wasn't nearly as crazy as you remember it to be, and over time your memory beautified or crazyfied the image. From that point it could have been anything, from teleguided toys to simply a dream that marked you so much that over time you remembered it as something that really happened.

Heh it could be aliens too (no its not)

that ticker up there is pretty cool! Good job dr Doug Beach you are great asset to salt world here is dubloon